Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (34 page)

5.2 Youth marching amongst the new Palaces for the People, MDM, Warsaw 1952.

This began a decade and a half of liberalization. East Germany, though relatively affluent, as the most western of the Eastern Bloc countries it had some of the harshest censorship and secret police in the whole Bloc. Especially against this background, Poland’s liberalized culture had splendid artistic results: its famed cinematography, which excelled from as early as 1955 (with the first Andrzej Wajda films, starting the phenomenon of the Polish Film School), and it continued to produce great films and directors well into the 1980s. This extended to literature, music and the press, which in particular will be the subject of my inquiry later on. Often, this movement criticized the system in the most open and direct way. Poland seemed to have won its revolt in 1956, which
made many sympathize with it - but instead of revolution it gave people the so-called “little stabilization”: more flats, more cars, but still of poor quality, and without the promised withdrawal of censorship. The growingly disappointed followers of the system started criticizing it, which led to March 1968 and the infamous purges of the Jewish citizens and “revisionists”, which once again, tragically sealed Polish destiny. But first, we’ll look at the two fighting ideals of culture, proletarian and bourgeois, which opposed and competed with each other in socialist Poland.

While we condemn the socialist period for the belatedness of our economy and being the “lesser Europe”, the future of our modern history was already decided in the small industrial enterprises and factories in the imperial United Kingdom. I will focus here on the un/development of the working class culture in Poland, to demonstrate some of the many reasons why the anti-capitalist revolution didn’t succeed in Eastern Europe.

Poland, though a major European power in the early modern era, experienced much slowing of its development, as its elites of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries weren’t interested in the accumulation of capital via cities and coasts, both decisive for the progress of capitalism, but mainly in the lands worked by serfs that they owned in the East. Subsequent wars and annexations weakened Poland to the degree it was partitioned in late eighteenth century and was swallowed by Prussia, the Russian Empire and Austria for over 120 years. Poland entered the twentieth century underindustralized, still with the terrible effects of peasant serfdom and the cult of the aristocracy-landowners and the Catholic Church as the carriers of Polish patriotism. This wasn’t a great soil for a strong labor movement. Despite this, a certain proletarian culture started to develop in big cities, especially in the Prussian partition in Pozńan and Silesia as a result of industralization begun in the last decades of the nineteenth century; and in the Russian partition,
there were strong socialist currents in Warsaw and especially Łódz, where a movement against both Tsarist and industrial exploitation, concentrated in textile factories, had a major role in the 1905 Revolution. But in general, the labor movement and labor culture were not strong in Poland.

After independence in 1918, the newly formed Communist Party was banned. The moderate socialist party, the PPS, was influential in the factories and in the parliament, but its power was circumscribed after the May 1926 coup by its former leader, Marshal Josef Piłsudski. So despite the efforts and the memory of 1905, Polish proletarian culture was weak. In the 1930s, the whole of Europe was characterized by growing nationalisms and dictatorships, and it was no different in Poland under the dictatorship first of Marshal Piłsudski and then his associates. Our traditions were weaker than in the Soviet Union, where the massive revolution of 1917 pervaded the whole nation. We also had a weaker trade union movement than Germany and France. All this made the development of ‘proletarian culture’ unlikely. But it wasn’t even bourgeois culture that was considered the national culture. It was the deeply rural peasant culture and the aristocratic culture of their landlords. This caste was also identical with the bearers of Polish patriotism and, though it’s never named this way, our “imperial” aspirations and ambitions - sympathies which were kept alive throughout the whole existence of the PRL by the intelligentsia. In this way the liberatory forces in the Polish tradition were at the same time often deeply reactionary, and the only vision of Poland that was truly Polish had to be necessarily a vision that was nationalistic, Catholic, and what’s more, a vision of the grandiose Poland, claiming the ownership of the
Kresy.
As it’s beyond doubt that Poland has borne a huge burden of suffering – the Holocaust, severe repression and destruction by the Nazi occupiers, and then Stalinism - it proposes a history in which only revenge over the enemy is at play, refusing to see or recognize its own colonial claims and nationalism.

Although these were among the reasons why the Polish social experiment that started after 1945 and lasted for 44 years wasn’t that successful, much else was the fault of the communist regime itself. It was imposed from the outside, set up initially as a Soviet colony, and it committed many crimes, which didn’t exactly help to legitimize it. It systematically lied about its recent history – about everything from the dissolution and mass murder of the first Polish Communist Party by the Soviets in the late 1930s, to the denial of Soviet responsibility for the massacre of thousands of Polish officers at Katyn.

But many of today’s class relations and people’s relationship to the recent history, as well as the refusal to criticize the capitalist transition, still comes from this pre-Soviet history. As it should be clear now, even if the war didn’t happen, Poland would still hardly have been on the economic level of the Western countries, even if we are to devote our time to such speculation. Yet we base our pretensions and dreams of being a ‘regular European country’ precisely on those claims. But the new regime, even if it raised Polish cities from the rubble, didn’t make it easier to identify or accept its rules. Even if it was introducing egalitarian rules, it was doing so via coercion. As it was rebuilding the country and elevating the peasantry or proletariat to previously unknown levels of literacy (books went from having a circulation of 1000 before the war to have 50,000 or 100,000 – the number often proudly displayed on the title page), building schools, libraries and propagating culture, at the same time it fought the intelligentsia, who were plagued with repressions. Under Stalinism, if the Party wanted to promote the proletariat, it did so by keeping children of the intelligentsia out of university, or sending them to the country for ‘reeducation’.

At the same time, they necessarily created their own ruling class and their own intelligentsia. This meant the upper echelon of the bureaucracy, but also a wholly new class of specialists, engineers, scientists and teachers, newly educated in the new circumstances. In some way, there was a continuity with the past, as a part of the previous intelligentsia survived the war. Yet, despite building this new ruling class, they couldn’t openly admit that they, the Communists, had become it, as to do so would be to abandon any claims to socialism.

5.3 Monumentalisation of labour. Stalin removed from compulsory worker’s reading after 1956.

The lyrics listed at the beginning of the chapter come from songs, which, mostly in the Stalinist period (1949-54) and around the Thaw (1956), were intended to encourage, empower and ennoble the working class and the task of labor. They were mostly written in the poetics of socialist realism - incredibly simplistic, grandiose, spectacular and heavy. The style spread from the architecture of Stalinist skyscrapers to the choral songs, played on the radio, exalting the labor and glory of the working classes, resurrecting the dead, destroyed Polish cities from the rubble. The moment to build a new culture after the war couldn’t have been more perfect: there was literally nothing left, as the Nazis left Poland in pieces. With its bourgeois and nationalist traditions, Polish society, only after enduring the loss respectively of its Jewish proletarian-petit-bourgeois base and a great deal of its intelligentsia and elites, had the ground “ready” to completely reformulate its structures.

5.4 Przekroj. The beauty of labour.

In principle and on the surface, within socialism it was finally the proletarian culture which was to become the dominant culture. Also, for the first time it was given a splendour, scale and magnificence it never had before. Never before were such palaces of marble
and gold, devoted to culture and development of the laboring class ever built. Proletarian culture became the official culture: culture designed for the working classes, in theory at least. Because it must be asked if people really did enjoy it or feel that it was theirs? The solemnity, heaviness, seriousness and scariness of the new sotsrealist art must’ve been also a deterrent. Especially in its Stalinist period, it was designed by the same token, to discipline and intimidate people: the grandiose socialist realist design had the effect of domination and stifling as much as ‘encouragement’. In reality, both reactions to the new culture were conceived to discipline people: as we know, communism was by no means accepted by the whole Polish society. So the initial efforts of the new authorities were designed to both please and rule an unruly society.

Post-Thaw, when there briefly was relative freedom and a lowering of censorship, culture, while becoming less heavy and rough (as must’ve been the stereotype of the proletariat), became lighter, more elegant…could we say more bourgeois? Today the locally patriotic songs sound nearly charming, especially about the biggest success of the post-war reconstruction, that is the capital, Warsaw. There are hundreds of propagandistic pro-Warsawian songs, often dressed as popular radio songs. From lighter tunes, cherishing the beauty of the Polish cities’ streets, with “I could be a Parisian boulevard flaneur, but would it be as good as promenading in Warsaw?” (of course, the question is rhetorical), to the much scarier and heavier, choral songs such as “We’re building the new Poland”, giving the quasi-religious or even operatic properties to these – what are they? – folk songs? Agitation songs? Of course, the political song has a long tradition. But it was only by “stealing” from the already existing and established high cultural forms that the pathos and splendor could be given to this equivalent of proletcult.

But was this culture really empowering by the sheer value of singing of the working class? First of all, the new culture, even though it was glorifying “labor” and workers, claimed that labor
was in fact a pleasure and an honor, because it served the building of the beloved socialist country, never mentioning the unpleasant, wearying, life-shortening aspects of hard work. Work becomes the “most beautiful dream”, membership in the party or organizations becomes “a new life”, and the factory becomes “our beloved port”. Crude and unimaginative as they are, they projected a reality on which work had incredible dignity, importance and its role was finally valued properly according to the value it had in the society. Yes, the working class is a necessary muscle of every society, without which any other activity wouldn’t be possible, yet it’s ritually dismissed and never written about in bourgeois art or literature. That was now to change. But was that just a revenge? And was PRL just a revenge on the previous exploiting class?